Fluent in 'Tucker'
by ellymelly
Summary: A series of Sam/Tucker one-offs set throughout the four seasons. Mostly harmless fluff.
1. Chapter 1

Fluent in 'Tucker'

"_I don't want excuses, Malcolm, I want it done. I want it done yesterday. I want it done before I phoned you in the dead of bloody 'All Hallows Eve' but seeing as we're a government distinctly lacking in time machines I'll have to settle for the morning news – preferably before the opposition catches a whiff of our rotting corpse wafting down Downing Street because it'll be your entrails wound around the gates like tinsel, Malcolm."_

"_Of course, Prime Minister."_

"_I mean it, make this go away."_

The phone against Tucker's face went dead. He listened to the comforting silence for a moment, relishing the sheer nothingness against his ear for a change. Anything was better than listening to either the desperate begging of ministers or terminal errors that threatened to break free and feed off the newsprint.

Finally, he set the Blackberry on his desk and eyed his empty cup of tea.

"Sam... SAM!"

The second shriek of her name was entirely unnecessary. Sam _always _heard him the first time.

She pushed open his door carefully in case he was lingering behind it like some kind of vampire bat. It was late. The curtains were still pulled open but there was only a black sky and small array of ever-dying street lights beyond them. The TV he had mounted at the far end of his office was muted so that he didn't have to endure the drone of fifth-rate reporters catching up to yesterday's news.

"Tea..." he muttered tiredly at her. He wasn't being deliberately short or rude, Malcolm was simply so over this day that had been going for longer than he could remember. It hadn't even occurred to him that it was eleven o'clock in the evening and his P.A. was still at his side with a fresh cup of tea and short list of mobiles he could call and have a shout at when he needed. All these years that Sam had been enslaved to him and he hadn't noticed that she _never _left before him just in case he needed her. He always did.

"Biscuits?" she asked.

He nodded before lifting his head to hiss venom at the silent TV that was flashing unflattering shots of one of his ministers from a story he'd rather explicitly told them to can. He made a mental note to verbally kill the producer then started indexing the top ten most creative ways he could do it.

"Something wrong?" Sam returned with tea and a plate of biscuits. She found her boss on the couch in front of the coffee table, glaring at his Blackberry with eyes that could melt civilisations. "Not again..." she sighed, realising what must have happened. "When do you have to go on air?"

Malcolm leaned over and tugged a biscuit from the plate.

"About eight hours," he muttered. "I have mere galactic seconds to turn this absolute shit-fuck that our charming PM created on his way home tonight into nothing. I have to give it a new post-code so that the PM can fanmail it safely from his rosey island of cotton wool and bubble wrap. I'm supposed to make it disappear like a fucking magician with my hat and twatty stick. Fetch me a few rabbits preferably with detachable ears if it's not too much trouble! I want to go all Gothic horror on this one."

Sam _sat_. She had to move his feet ever so slightly on the couch so that she could fit between him and the silk cushions. Even now she couldn't repress a smile at the memory of him threatening to pin the face of every victim he'd fed to the press. He had a wicked sense of humour – quite literally.

He frowned when he saw her extract his laptop from the table, hack his password and start typing. "Why are you there?" Particularly _there _at the end of his couch.

"Someone has to draft your speech," Sam shrugged. "It's a darn sight easier than filtering out all the 'fucks' and 'cunts' later in the morning when we're short on time. Why don't you start speaking and I'll see what I can come up with?"

The hilarious thing about trying to filter Malcolm Tucker was that you didn't have to be the world's fastest typist to keep up with his stream of conscious. The majority of his thoughts came out in expletives so vivid and abstract that it was very nearly a second language. Indeed, Sam was fluent in _Tucker_ but as the night went on he ran out of the energy, too tired to swear. Eventually he was flying a few half way decent thoughts around, all of which Sam expanded upon and moved into coherent sentences for him while he busily tore through the flesh of a few mandarins. As a side note, she'd noticed that eating fruit was a weird, coping mechanism. It gave his hands something to do that didn't include stabbing ministers to death with pens.

It took Sam a moment to realise that Tucker wasn't pealing his mandarin any more, or muttering death threats – he was asleep. His head rested against one of the cushions, tilted to the side and calm in a way that the world didn't often get to see him. He looked ten years younger simply by sleeping. In his hand, which was almost on the floor, was a half-opened mandarin.

Sam sighed. She didn't have the heart to wake him. If her maths was accurate, he'd been going for almost three days straight. Even though she was certain that he was some kind of super-human monster he had his limits.

Without any fuss or noise, she took his Blackberry and carefully went through the PM's requests for the cover story. Sam spent the remainder of the night on the couch eating his mandarins, writing Tucker's speech. She tossed in a few abrasive (but clean) quotes so that they'd know it was Malcolm, edited a few 'fucks' that she'd missed the first time round before finally printing it and leaving his speech on the table next to where he was sleeping. She'd pulled a soft throw over him during the night and put the only surviving mandarin safely back up on the table where it belonged.

Work started in an hour. Sam didn't see the point in going home so she retreated to the bathroom instead to change into one of the spare suits that she kept in the office for situations exactly like this. It said a lot about her job that she had enough supplies to live out of Downing Street for a week. Hell if there was an apocalypse she'd be the only one prepared. Not that anyone would notice. This place was the zombie hive. They strolled past her daily carrying whatever limbs Tucker ripped off them.

She gave her boss as many minutes rest as possible before returning to Tucker's office with a dry cleaned suit, laying it over his chair. He might look all peaceful and adorable, breathing quietly on the couch but the minute she woke him Sam knew that he'd unleash a storm of abuse on whomever was closest which reminded her, she really should re-organise his day so that he didn't kill off any of the small fish coming for their first meeting. Maybe she could throw in a few appointments with his least favourite examples of humanity – a good shouting usually got most of the hostility out of his system.

First up – Meet the Press.

Sam placed Malcolm's Blackberry in his hand without waking him then quickly evacuated his office. She sat behind her desk and dialled his number.

The phone in Tucker's hand vibrated. His fingers curled around it as though the device were an extension of his skin. The damn thing had been wired into his brain for the past ten years. When it woke, he woke.

"_Tucker's knackery for MP's past their use by date..."_

Sam lifted her hand to her mouth, hiding a grin. "You have a meeting in half an hour. Your car is outside and there's tea on your desk." She hung up swiftly, leaving him to rant apocalyptic buggery at his phone while she confirmed his appointment and politely told a few half-rate hacks to fuck-off about whatever may or may not have happened to the PM yesterday.

* * *

><p>Hours later, Sam peeked around the corner of his office door carrying the world's largest skinny hazelnut latte.<p>

"Watch your step – there's blood all over the floor..." Tucker muttered, waving at the remnants of his speech he'd left scattered over the carpet.

"But not yours," Sam replied, stepping over the discarded speech. She set his coffee down beside him and grinned. "He owes you."

"Yeah well, if Tom _ever_ says anything remotely similar to what he allegedly said last night – in public – I will have it printed and embossed onto the doors of parliament my-fucking-self and nail his hands up beside it. It's an honest to fuck miracle that the universe let that one slip by."

"Ancient Rome – you really are upset." He reserved those insults for the lowest levels of the human order. "Shall I cancel the rest of your appointments or do you fancy a bit more exercise?"

"Sweet heart, nothing can exercise these demons out of this carcass." He sipped his coffee, not missing that she'd brought his favourite. She was probably trying to make him safe again for mortals to speak to. "But yeah, why not. Send something tasty you know – something I can chew a bit. Fangs get too long if they're not filed back."

Those few smiles he'd snuck in were as close to, 'thank you' as she would get but in Malcolm's world he'd practically sent her a card with little love hearts.

"I might even go out to eat," he added, before she left. "See if there's any lunch at DoSAC."

* * *

><p>With the monster prowling the halls of DoSAC, everything was peaceful at Downing Street. Sam picked up the largest pile of complaints she'd ever seen and carried them over to Malcolm's office. Incredibly, these weren't complaints against him but rather useless, trivial whinges against people so boring she had to look them up in the database to put faces to names. Malcolm only insisted on keeping copies so that he could dig shit up on anyone who had ever been <em>anyone <em>at some point in the future. It was a work ethic that served him well. People joked that Malcolm Tucker knew were all the political skeletons were buried – they were only half right. Tucker knew where every skeleton that had ever been shed on the political stage laid and all their illegitimate baby skeletons too. Hell he even had a political pet cemetery somewhere.

"Shall we continue this somewhere more private – just, pick up your bloody stumps and drag them this way, to my office." Tucker could be heard miles down the hallway with some poor, terrified cabinet minister in tow. He thought it was odd when he sauntered past Sam's desk that his P.A. wasn't there to give him her usual private grin whenever he was about to make a kill. Some might go as far as to say that he over-dramatised events simply to get a rise out of her.

A moment later, he found out why.

Sound asleep, laid out on his couch was Sam, curled up to a cushion. Malcolm backtracked out of his own office so fast he nearly trampled the MP into the carpet. The last thing he needed was for anyone to see a young woman asleep in his office. Not even Sam could tailor his ass out of that story.

"Ah – second thoughts, I fancy a tea," Tucker said lightly, closing the door to his office before the MP could sneak a look. "Follow me to the kitchen, won't you, so I can pour scalding water over your limp cock, see if we can't give it a bit of a wake up because you're going to need balls the size of Miller's head to get yourself out of this mess."


	2. Chapter 2

When you were under the employ of Malcolm _Fucking_ Tucker, you learned very quickly that the dominant form of communicate was spilled forth as raw, unadulterated and wildly inappropriate metaphor.

It could be a strange experience, especially when you were half a dozen layers deep in a perverted analogy with more dots per inch than a Peter Jackson tragedy. It was a fantasy your brain scrubbed off with stomach acid and doubled the leading cause of unsanctioned bi-partisan lobotomies (the remainder were self inflicted during recovery from a 'Tuckering').

It was not uncommon to see members of either party lingering in corners, heads against the soothing concrete like the un-dead. The chosen few were left strewn over the political battlefield, wrapping themselves in quick-bond and making damn fucking certain they kept track of every pet name and fictional location Tucker's maelstrom invented in case the topic of rage shifted to their ass and its imminent parting from the spine.

A very long time ago somewhere between latte's and carnage, Sam discovered that 99% of the trash Malcolm talked was a _rouse_.

He would kill her for thinking it but Malcolm was a small dog with the biggest ribcage, bark and ID tag that read, _'pure fuck'_ because that was what he was going to do to whomever tried to pet him. Still, Sam had seen his bluff called by people with _real_ power and that vulnerable silence of desperation that followed unsettled her more than another tumbler finding its demise against the wall in a spray of death.

Without words, Malcolm was lost. Words were his armour – his bark and his soul. If he wasn't fighting, then the political universe was on the verge of a stall.

Knowledge was Tucker's sword.

He kept some very nasty secrets against a precious few people. His only protection in the world was the ability to fell the towers on which everyone else stood. There was no point controlling the masses – they were meaningless blobs of salt froth evaporating off the sand. He spent all of is time owning the hearts of the moon and sun so that he could halt the tide.

Strictly speaking, that wasn't in his job description. He was Director of Communications not 'Chief Angle of Darkness'.

"Sam... SAM!" Malcolm waited for Sam's patient face to peak around his door. "Could you send an ambulance over to DoSAC for Nicola Murray? Yeah – might need a second one for her head as it's coming separately. Later – after I'm through with the secret burial and demonic rites, I need to borrow your car."

He might as well just call it, 'his' car. These days he used it more than she did.

"Is it still parked at your house?" Sam hadn't seen it in weeks.

"Oh _fuck_..." he hissed. He'd entirely forgotten about the Audi sitting in his driveway collecting dew.

"I'll call you a cab. To your house. To get my car."

He was tempted to tear a few very small strips off Sam but she hadn't brought him any biscuits or tea in the last hour and she wasn't likely to if he went all Malciavellian on her. Malcolm really wanted biscuits, so he deflected his temper to Nicola Murray, whose irritating drivel was continuing to seep out the radio in his room like putrid swamp fog.

"Oh yeah – say it again... Let me get you a nice small box with no air holes so you'll feel more comfortable. Your coming across more closeted than Tom Cruise on a Spice Girl tour."

Sam lofted an eyebrow. It was a bit like listening to road rage.

"You're going to wish you were being airfreighted to Brazil on the back of an Albatross with a crooked wing and bad drinking problem doing circles over Ant-fucking-tarctica. Are you taking notes?" he looked up to Sam, who was scratching a few things in her diary while he ranted.

"Someone has to write your memoirs," she shrugged.

"Seriously?" There was a warning glint of venom in his eyes. Nobody quoted him unless they wanted their fingers plaited.

Sam tore the page out of her diary and handed it to him. His extremely Scottish eyebrows folded down for a moment before he broke into a deeply amused chuckle.

"Fair-a-fucking-nough..."

It was a petrol bill for her car.

"You may have been raised by wolves," Sam added, closing her diary, "but I was raised by vampires. We never say a word."

It would be an outright lie to say Tucker didn't watch his P.A. saunter away with a dark grin on his lips. She was broken in every way he liked and he had the distinct feeling that he was seeping into her cracks, splintering them further.

"They should get you to run the country..." he called after her.

She stopped, hand sliding down his door frame as though it were his blackened soul.

"You wouldn't like that," Sam insisted. "There'd be nothing for you to do."

* * *

><p>"Where's Tucker? Hmm where's the chief rodent?" A bald man with a lot of repressed frustration parted the interns as he drew uncomfortably close to Sam's desk. "Has he evacuated the ship already – is there some serious listing that the government should be aware of?"<p>

Sam didn't reply to Julius yet. She wanted to make absolutely certain that she knew which crisis he was referring to before she fed him any information he wasn't already privy to. Hell sometimes he just wandered down for a bit of a stroll.

"He better not be loitering in the bushes out front the PM's residence in Dover... is he? Sammy..."

Maybe he was, maybe he wasn't but she was absolutely positive Julius's body was about to go in four directions simultaneously if he called her fucking 'Sammy' again.

"Would you like me to find out where he is and have him call you?" she replied sweetly, as she imagined stapling post-it notes to his crown.

"Yes. You do that then. Mail him my heart and tell him it's bleeding all over the morning papers."

"I'll pass that on."

* * *

><p>Malcolm didn't answer her call which meant he was bloody well down in Dover. Fuck, she hoped there were a few life vests on the Titanic.<p>

_Your favourite reindeer shat all over the carpet._

_X S_

She sighed and set her phone to one side. It barely introduced itself to the desk when Malcolm's reply buzzed in.

_The one with the broken antler and half a tail? I thought I told you to leave a fuck-load of carrots out back and something about expressly never wanting to see it inside the house again?_

_X M_

The side of Sam's lip curled up.

_It misses Santa. It's going to share its heartbreak with the other reindeer shortly._

_X S_

There was a slightly longer pause this time.

_brb – making venison for dinner._

_X M_

* * *

><p>Sam turned off the TV and its hilarious interview with a particularly flustered Julius who kept rubbing his bald head as if he were some kind of lucky Buddha.<p>

_Congratulations, the venison was wonderful. Michelin star._

_X S_

_Michelin stars are for French cunts._

_X M_

Sam grinned at her phone. She never confused his humour for insult.

_P.S. Go the fuck home. It's Christmas for fuck's sake. You better not be there when I get there. I have a hot date with the evening news and I have a feeling she's really going to put out._

_X M_

* * *

><p>She was doing several things that would have caused lesser mortals to have their skin flayed and bone fragments mixed with gunpowder and turned into the evening's entertainment.<p>

Sam was in _his_ chair, feet on _his _desk, smoking one of _his _cigars. Malcolm wasn't sure why the only intelligent thing that he could think to open with was, "Since when does your posh skirt smoke?"

Malcolm barely passed at pretending to smoke. He only kept a box on his desk so that the Oxford Club wouldn't kick him out of their sad sweaty soirees. He had to keep up the pretence that he could handle anything the others could, even if it was literally killing them. He certainly wasn't going to let her follow suit.

"Put that expensive fucking thing down," he insisted, stalking over to her. He took the cigar from her and put it out – but not before taking a deep whiff himself to prove a point.

Sam couldn't help shifting in her seat. Her lips had touched that moments before his and it shouldn't have felt intimate but it did.

She would have gone as far as to say it was 'seductive' until he nearly choked.

"These things are purely ornamental," he covered, smashing it into a saucer. "I told you to go home."

"I told you to be careful," she countered, shrugging. "They _know_ Malcolm. Cool your blood hound scent and let me do the digging on this one. I'll call in sick for a few days. They won't so much as blink a precious false eyelash."

"I don't think-"

"Good." It was her job to protect him from everything, including his own stupid ideas. "Presents." Sam tapped a small pile of items neatly stacked on his desk. "It is, as you say, Christmas. At least it will be in an hour or so." It wasn't like he had a home to rush back to.

"Aw, you shouldn't have..." Malcolm found himself grinning. She'd even put a bow around one of the piles of paperwork. "Have you been digging up graves again for me?" he asked, untying one of the bundles.

"Well, it's been quiet lately. I have to find some way to kill time. I'll leave you with the spoils. Merry Christmas. I'll set your dark elves to work in the morning. They're all drunk as fuck right now."

Sam finally relinquished ownership of Tucker's chair, sliding past him. He took her place, sitting himself in front of he absolute treasure trove that she'd left. That was the thing with Sam, attention to detail. She picked up on things that not even his hawk-eyed-paranoia caught. Maybe she was telling the truth and she really was raised by vampires. Her teeth were quite sharp. Malcolm absently wondered what they would feel like biting into his neck.

He cleared his throat and shifted awkwardly. No. It was not a good idea to extend the metaphor that far – not unless he was prepared for it to mutate into a scene from Twilight.

Heaven-for-fucking-bid.

* * *

><p>Considering her car was now ditched out front, Sam decided to take that home instead of slumming it through the snow and ice on some of London's finest buses. She'd swiped the keys from his jacket earlier, along with a Twix bar that she needed more than he did.<p>

For a moment she glanced up to his window. There was a light creeping out from around the edges even with the curtain drawn. She wondered how long he'd stay there – probably all night considered the wealth of material she'd just gifted him. It was a project that Sam had been sinking her claws into all year. If there was one thing that she had learned working under the Great and Powerful Heart of Darkness, it was to _listen. _Always listen. People as a species were utterly shit at keeping secrets. They slipped out continuously all you had to do was have your ears open and your mouth shut. It was certainly true what people said of her, she never said a goddamn thing. She listened though. Listened to everything that went on inside the walls. People forgot she was there. People forgot that she was an extension of Tucker – an extra limb – another sense. Sam was his good eye and moral compass.

Tucker's sword was forged by Sam and her only request of the world was that she got to watch him wield it.

* * *

><p>"Sam... SAM!"<p>

Malcolm blinked. Frowned, checked his watch and looked up at the empty door. No Sam. No tea. No biscuits.

"SAM!" he shouted again.

Definitely no Sam.

_The fuck are you?_

_X M_

He un-muted the TV and threw his phone down unfairly hard. He snatched a mandarin and tore its insides apart.

_Hunting reindeer._

_X S_

Tucker stopped and let his lips part in a large festive grin. That's his girl.

_Bring some biscuits back, will ya?_

_X M_


End file.
